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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
September 2005, Volume 4, Issue 9

search engine marketing

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmakkah: Optimize Early for Holiday Shoppers

by Caitlin Miller, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

True, there are still leaves on the trees and still days when your air conditioner may be whirring full blast in the background, but for your search engine marketing campaign, the holiday season is getting frighteningly close. The race has already begun for online retailers competing for a piece of that holiday pie... but it’s not too late. Through strategic planning and decisive action, your site can still be in readied to attract holiday shoppers.

But You Must Act Now!

Let this be a wake-up call to retailers looking to dramatically increase their traffic and conversions from search engines this holiday season. When people begin thinking about their holiday shopping this year, a record number will be turning to search engines to help them spend their money. Here’s why timing is critical; search engines can take weeks, and even months, to find your website, recognize the changes or additions that have been made, and re-index it within their database. If you have new products, updated descriptions, special holiday terms, expanded colors, sizes or styles, even rules for holiday shipping, you need to implement those changes and optimize your content today. Otherwise, holiday shoppers may end up clicking their way to the websites of your competitors.

Hot or Not?

Prior to implementing site changes and optimizing your content for the holiday season, performing keyword research is critical. People (especially kids) can be so fickle. Who can forget parents fighting tooth and nail in the aisles over the Tickle-Me-Elmo doll? Poor Elmo is now gathering dust on many toy store shelves. Understanding market trends and “hot” items will enable you to position your website to intercept this year’s online rush for the latest hot items.

Awareness of the language that’s being used by your target audience will help you to select the keyword phrases that will generate the most traffic, and produce the most conversions. You wouldn’t use the same words to describe “gravity” to a five year old as you would to an astrophysicist, so consider carefully who is likely to be searching for your products, use your log files to show you how they’ve been finding your site.

It’s a Popularity Contest

A search engine’s job is to provide its users with search results that contain the most relevant websites on any given keyword phrase. In essence, the search engine’s job is to think like the potential customer. In the perfect world, the engine would understand exactly what the searcher was looking for and would know on exactly which website it was contained.

Unfortunately, technology has only come so far – leaving a gap between the search engine’s interpretation and the user’s actual desire. Fortunately, this gives search marketers the opportunity to bridge that gap, and it gives intelligent, motivated retailers the advantage when they utilize techniques to ensure that their sites contain content and links that are viewed by the search engines as relevant to their targeted keywords and “credible.”

Beyond understanding the language used by your target audience, there is simply no substitute for having a credible site. Link popularity is often the biggest determinant in establishing that credibility and therefore, in gaining top rankings in the natural search results. If a search engine sees that other websites link to yours, it concludes that your site is credible, and ranks your Web pages accordingly.

Once you’ve completed your keyword research, it’s time to get out there and make friends. Find websites related to your keyword phrases and request links back to your site. Don’t be shy. Webmasters can be slow to add new links and search engines take time to recognize new links, so immediate action is essential to ranking well in time for holiday shopping. For a great jump start on this process, see the article in this issue, entitled The Power of Partnering, which discusses who the first people are that you should be approaching in order to enhance your link popularity.

Who Wants Dessert?

My apologies to the procrastinators in the crowd, but this is a time for action. While you may already know what your potential customers are looking for, and you may be able to optimize your site fairly quickly, search engines take their time. And everyone wants some of the holiday pie, so implement your changes now to secure your slice.

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